Just watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time and I need to talk about it.
Throughout the movie, we see Ennis experience a lot of intense discomfort and fear at the idea of being intimate with a man, despite it becoming abundantly clear in the details and based on his actions that that is indeed what he wants. He even admits to Jack that this fear stems from an experience he had at a young age, when his father showed him two men who were presumed to be lovers (they were roommates vibes), murdered and castrated, with him basically using it as a lesson to show Ennis that being gay was wrong and would get you killed.
Jack on the other hand was a little less discomforted or fearful at the idea of being with a man, in that we actually saw him return the following summer to Brokeback Mountain hoping Ennis would be there, only for him to show up alone. We saw how after this he confidently approached a man at the bar hoping to get to know him, only to get rejected and risk getting hate crimed (foreshadowing 😭). And we saw how, over time, Jack’s struggle had more to do with being hurt over Ennis’ unwillingness to commit or even just consider the possibility of them being together long term, even despite the risk of being gay in the 60’s.
Near the end of the film, upon Jack’s death, Ennis discovers from his father that over the past 20 years since they met at Brokeback Mountain, Jack constantly brought it up to his folks, how Ennis, his friend, was going to move up to their ranch and they were going to build a cabin and live together and take over for the family.
Jack was often the one in the moment taking the chances for them to be together. He was the one who mentioned that they could go to Mexico, with Ennis furiously rejecting it saying ‘you know what happens to people like you there??’
But what’s even more painful, is that in this same scene, Ennis’ acknowledges the truth more directly, and why it’s so painful is because it ends up ironically coming true:
Here, Ennis is basically saying that if he decides to be with Jack for real, aka faces his queerness head on, that’s going to be the thing that gets them (Jack) killed. Shortly after this, Jack loses it and has that infamous ass monologue, followed by Ennis breaking down over how it’s Jack’s fault that he’s this way in the first place.
In the end, when Jack dies, Ennis finds out about what happened from Jack’s wife, Lureen Newsome, who said Jack was pumping up a flat out on a backroad when his tire blew up, with the rim of the tire slamming his face, breaking his nose and jaw, and knocking him unconscious on his back. By the time someone drove by on the deserted backroad, he had drowned in his own blood.
The audience might’ve believed this story, if it wasn’t for how rehearsed it sounded coming out of Lureen’s mouth, but it also doesn’t help that images of Jack being hate crimed as his true cause of death are flashing across Ennis’s mind in real time while Lureen is telling him about the ‘accident’.
While it’s left up to interpretation, it’s implied from what his wife and father said, that Jack was hate-crimed by his father in law, with it being covered up.
Broken nose? Broken jaw?… Those are the kinds of wounds someone endures after being beaten up. And if it’s happening to the point of death, then he was essentially beaten to death.
This then fits into what Jack’s father said, because apparently, shortly before he died, he’d told his father he’d found a different friend that was going to come up there to the ranch with him. And so it’s very likely Lureen’s father caught wind of this as his plans to leave neared, leading to his murder (Jack also bitched his father in law tf out in an epic way, which on its own felt unnecessary in the moment, but within the context of this makes a whole lot more sense).
Either way, it seems Jack waited for Ennis to change his mind. 20 years he waited, and when Ennis didn’t, Jack finally moved on with someone else who made an offer of his own years before, only to get murdered just as Ennis feared he would if he decided to live his life authentically.
Ennis initially found out like this, in a postcard that bounced of him inquiring Jack about seeing each other again after that last massive fall out where they had, only for Ennis’s worst fear to be realized:
Nov 7th with deceased stamped across it has me spiraling 😭
Now, obviously Brokeback Mountain is one of the most well known queer films of all time, like there’s no denying that. So it’s fairly easy to assume ST could be taking some inspiration from this film just like they have with hundreds upon hundreds of other films. But especially if they are planning to go the queer route, homage to this film is pretty much guaranteed (there’s also one more reason it might be guaranteed, but I’m saving that for the end 🤣).
Regardless, as you can probably already tell, it’s very easy to see similarities between Ennis with Mike and Jack with Will.
Mike getting the ‘you see Michael? You see what happens?’ treatment from his father, in the first episode in the series, is very Ennis coded in that this is a TV show that follows that up with seasons of Mike pushing Will away from him, with it leading to a boiling point where he says, ‘What did you think? Really? That we were never gonna get girlfriends? That we were just gonna sit in my basement in play games for the rest of our lives?’ with Will responding, ‘Yeah. I guess I did. I really did,’ aka extremely Jack coded.
The really epic thing about this though, is that ST is clearly going on a different journey than Brokeback Mountain did, in that it’s simply subverting the bury your gays trope. While they are acknowledging the risk of being queer in the 80’s, they’re not letting it end ‘realistically’ like many people have insisted it must because that is the only option. And this will be a satisfying ending because it’s coming as a response to all those heartbreaking stories before it that have reinforced this idea that happy endings just aren’t an option for gay people who simply want to be together.
While Ennis and Jack didnt get their happy ending like they wanted, Mike and Will on the other hand 😏
And last but not least, on a more hilariously ironic note, the guy who Jack was going to settle for in the end instead of Ennis, was a guy named Randall Malone, played by none other than David fucking Harbour.
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Sort of a distant tangent off my post about Ashton, but I'm growing more and more suspicious of the fandom claim that there's no time for small RP moments in Campaign 3. I do think that it's been challenging to get deeper party bonding or serious conversations that aren't about the big philosophical questions they're facing, since those do take much more time; but then I think about Calamity, or Candela Obscura. I can genuinely give you at least a couple paragraphs about pretty much every relationship in the two Circles, or in the Ring of Brass. I can also point to no shortage of small moments between characters in the Mighty Nein Aeor or Vox Machina Vecna endgame episodes, which were all extremely plot-heavy and fast-paced, and D20 consistently nails character relationships in a fraction of the time.
I think it really does come down to, as Brennan Lee Mulligan always says, the character creation phase. Laying down a solid groundwork in which everyone has a detailed, rich backstory and sense of personality and relationship history (in the case of characters who knew each other prior to the start of the series) is absolutely crucial, and even in the case of characters who don't know each other before going in, a good amount of time spent in character creation ensures that it's easier for them to develop those interpersonal relationships on the fly. I know in actual play there's some degree of finding the character as you play, but there are games for which there is a very short runway, and I don't think it ever hurts to do more extensive character prep than the bare minimum. And if there are gaps, I think it also helps to go back and fill those in mid-way, away from the table - Travis clarifying Chetney's backstory being a great example that allowed the history of Chetney and Deanna to feel realized and full, despite only a few episodes.
I'll also be blunt: most of the time when people complain that there aren't moments because the plot keeps moving...they're mad about shipping. Which has always rung hollow to me. It was a common complaint in C2, that no time was taken for character relationships, despite them taking an entire half of an episode for the Beauyasha date and despite no shortage of moments for all three of the other couples (and plenty of platonic moments between friends). The issue was never a lack of time; it was that the characters they wanted to talk to each other didn't actually have the relationship in canon that the fans had dreamed up, and so, when the chips were down, they went to other people.
It takes two seconds to say something like "I hold their hand", even in the middle of plot-heavy adventuring. If someone doesn't say it, it's rarely the GM rushing them; it's the player either choosing not to do so, or not remembering to do so, and either of those is quite revealing regarding how the player feels about that relationship and where it stands in their priorities.
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